Monday, August 27, 2007

The Pet Laptop

My laptop is home, safe and fixed, ready for 10k for Labor Day.

That's the annual Piker Press bums' challenge: To write ten thousand words from Friday morning to midnight Labor Day. Any words. Poems, stories, opinion -- whatever.

It's kind of a warm up for NaNoWriMo, when we write a novel in a month. Sort of gets you remembering what a gas it is to sit down and hammer out a bunch of words ... primes the pump, so to speak.

I've never managed to hit the 10k over Labor Day weekend, but I did have one day (the last writing day for me) last November when I pounded out an amazing rush of over four thousand words. They just poured out -- and were coherent, too, which astounds me.

This past week I managed to cough up a story and a poem. Woo.

I'm looking forward to sitting with my laptop on Friday and just leaping, word-wise, into a fresh new blank document.

In family news, my sister is reasonably comfortably ensconced in a nursing home. I've been in contact with people from the home and from the Agency who are Jan's legal guardians. She's receiving decent care, and she's alive. I wish she could survive at least through Christmas; our mother didn't bother with Christmas the last couple years. Wouldn't a Christmas concert be nice?

My mother's neighbor thinks it's time for me to start calling my mother again. I wondered if that was true, but then today was so shaky and dippy about having to go out into the world by myself to pick up the laptop and go to the store --- no, I'm still a wreck, and there's no getting around that. One does what one can.

This one did what she could today, and now is done until tomorrow.

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